Higher education is in crisis — business as usual won’t save it

The candidates of the United Faculty for the Common Good slate share a conviction: higher education faces a profound crisis decades in the making. For more than half a century, public disinvestment, privatization, and growing inequality have undermined our colleges and universities, weakening their ability to serve students, workers, and communities.

Region 1:
Antonio Gallo
California State University, Northridge

Region 2:
Leonard Bright
Texas A&M University

Region 3:
Gretchen McNamara
Wright State University

Region 4:
Roxanne Shirazi
The City University of New York

Region 5:
Nikolas Bowie
Harvard University

At-Large:
Charmaine Chua
University of California, Berkeley

This crisis cannot be solved through business as usual. We face the commodification of education, the expansion of precarious academic labor, crushing student debt, attacks on tenure and academic freedom, and the erosion of shared governance. Across the country, political interference and ideological attacks threaten the core mission of higher education as a public good.

At the same time, institutions have too often prioritized administrative expansion, branding, and market competition over teaching, research, and the democratic participation of those who make our campuses function.

The scale of these challenges demands a new approach—one rooted in organizing, solidarity, and collective power.

We believe the AAUP must build the power necessary to transform higher education. That means making organizing our central mission and embracing a vision of wall-to-wall organizing that unites workers across campuses and beyond them.

For us, this means:

  • Breaking down barriers between workers and building advocacy chapters, coalitions, and collective bargaining units that unite faculty, graduate workers, professional staff, dining workers, and all who contribute to the life of our institutions.

  • Confronting contingency and fighting to ensure that every higher education worker is treated with dignity, respect, and economic security.

  • Defending tenure, academic freedom, shared governance, and the democratic mission of higher education.

  • Fighting political interference, censorship, and the influence of dark money on our institutions.

  • Protecting and expanding diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that help all students thrive.

  • Standing with students to cancel student debt and win debt-free, high-quality public higher education.

  • Organizing alongside the communities to which our campuses belong, recognizing that universities are accountable to the public they serve.

  • Addressing both historic and ongoing harms caused by higher education institutions, including labor exploitation, displacement, exclusion, and discrimination.

  • Building broad coalitions capable of winning the public investment and democratic reforms that higher education needs.

Only by organizing all faculty, building alliances across our campuses, and forging coalitions for the common good can we create a higher education system worthy of its democratic promise.

Another university is possible—and together we can build it.